Amika Mobile Blog

The blogs are buzzing with the latest prediction that Apple will sell 45 Million iPhones by 2009! Note that in 2007, all smartphone vendors combined sold only 38 Million units. So, how is Apple going to pull this off? According to popular blogging, they will do this by introducing next generation devices. Some bloggers are going even further and predicting the demise of the Blackberry in the face of such a conquest by the iPhone. So, what do I think? I think that the iPhone and the Blackberry will indeed continue to fight for Smartphone market share. At the same time the good old vanilla phone of which 1 Billion units were sold in 2007 according to IDC to place 3.3 Billion in use will continue to dominate the market. This is why applications like ours that can intelligently analyze content and take it down to the 2×2 inch micro screen especially for killer apps like Email-to-SMS will be very important. Our applications act as Context Firewalls^TM for these devices to make sure only the relevant and most useful content is pushed to the mobile not whatever and whoever wants to spam your Inbox gets you.  Enough said. …Sue Abu-Hakima

So, CTIA 2008 has come and gone in Las Vegas. From a mechanical bull, a Fashion show at the Alcatel Booth, a pink eerie statue at the Sony Ericsson booth, pretty in purple at the Samsung booth and both Iron Man and a Dick Tracy mobile phone watch from LG - it sounds like the gimmicks were in full force. So, what is next for mobility? My bet is on smarter applications for mobile phones that deliver information that you need rather than pushing everything to your mobile gadget. I have started speaking about the need for Context Firewalls(TM)  for mobility so that you get interrupted in certain contexts only when you need to be interrupted. This will release mobile phone users from the leash of being on and interruptible and hence stressed 24×7. …Sue Abu-Hakima

The killer application for the mobile phone has always been messaging whether it is email or texting. It is messaging! There are 215 Billion emails and 500 Billion SMS messages circumnavigating the globe daily. Surely, there is a good reason why things like shopping using the mobile phone, watching movies or getting updates from LOLcats are not killer apps. It is email and texting and it is about getting the critical email content through SMS onto the mobile phone.  Applications like ours allow the Service Providers and Enterprise to deliver the killer app to any of the 3.3 Billion SMS phones not just the 60 Million SmartPhones which only make up 2% of the mobile phone penetration! Enough said, don’t you think? .

…Sue Abu-Hakima  

It seems that the overriding theme at CTIA this week has been a number of announcements from mobile phone vendors like LG, Nokia, Blackberry and Samsung according to Cnet CTIA 2008 news . Several seem to be trying to clone the iPhone. And why not??? Apple has managed to sell more than 3.7 million iPhones in 6 months in 2007 and are targeting 10 million in 2008.  They did what other SmartPhone vendors have not been able to do in over a decade!  The trick will be that these iPhone wanabes have to get the magic of Apple’s UI and hardware integration right so that the experience for the end user is as good as apple pie! ….Sue Abu-Hakima

• More on SmartPhones. Is the phone the computer as Nokia likes to say? I say your mobile phone 2×2 inch screen cannot replace your 19 inch screen and desktop computer no matter how tiny the font becomes and how many things you make your phone do. The premise is that the mobile phone has to give you content in context  and smart alerts not flood you with irrelevant information.

• More discussion on carriers versus open platforms from Google and Yahoo! Nice demos of Yahoo! Go 3.0 on SmartPhones.

• Keynote on Advertising on Mobile Phones – Europe versus NA – more visual and pictorial versus textual. Will people really accept a lot of ads to get free services on the mobile phone? I think we underestimate the 12 to 30 year old demographics patience for ads. Big money still years away regardless!

• Keynote on Mobilizing Content – my 2 cents into AI – we are at 90% and the like the last mile,  the last 10% will continue to evolve! So, stay tuned!

Everyone at the Summit got a bit distracted though as Jennifer Aniston was filming - more content for your phone - at the Hyatt venue on Burrard!

Very interesting discussions on where we are going with mobility? What is the future of carriers? What will the Open Platform from Google – Android really do – does it really pose a threat to the carrier model? My sense is that Android will allow quicker deployment of applications for Smart Phones. Where I am not sure yet is what it will do for the 3.3 Billion SMS phones. There, we are still talking about SMS limits of 160 character packets or 16 words and if we want to have useful content, we will absolutely need AI to help us decipher context and what critical content is. Just my 2 cents.

Had an interesting experience yesterday upgrading mobile phones and adding a second mobile line despite the deluge of snow in the East! Here are a few takeaways:

 1) Read the fine print very carefully! Unlimited SMS or text messaging does not mean infinite! With some carriers, it means monthly 100 SMS, others 500 SMS and others 2500 SMS. If you pick 100 SMS for $5/month, then every other one after that may cost 0 to 15 cents! Thus, 100 more may cost nothing or $15, 200 more $30 and 300 more $40 and so on! One of our friends had a big shock recently when he received a $200 SMS bill because his ‘unlimited SMS’ topped out at 500 SMS!

2) Not all carrier plans are created equal! Many carriers are trying to get as many subs onboard as possible before Xmas. As such, they are giving you the hardware free - Blackberry, Nokia phone, you name it (!) - as long as you subscribe to a 3 year service plan that is $30 for voice and $15 for ‘unlimited’ Email/Texting. That amounts to $540 a year for 3 years or $1620 lock in contract that if broken has to be paid out! There may be nothing wrong with this if you plan to love your carrier enough to not want to switch for 3 yrs! The carriers are doing this to reduce churn! Your other choice is to go for no contract but pay the $300 to $600 for the phone and the higher monthly fees! These are likly to be closer to $200 for unlimited Email/Text and pay as you go voice as most carriers will not give you a bundle of voice/email without a contract to reduce churn!

 So, the bottom line is be very aware of what plan you sign up to and make sure you review your bill occasionally as you never know when that ‘unlimited’ email or text plan becomes very limited!

 Cheers one and all for a safe holiday!….Sue 

Google has made a series of interesting acquisitions around the mobile space: Android (for the leader and talent and implementation of their announced Internet mobility open platform focussed on mobility in-context);  Reqwireless (a tiny Waterloo-based company with a Java ME browser to transform desktop content for a handheld);  Zingku (a mobile social networking service for trusted groups of people that runs over SMS); Dodgeball (an earlier social networking acquisition that Google closed - also worked over SMS on mobile phones but its integration into Google seems to not have gone well ). Google has also signed deals with companies like Vodaphone who will eventually launch a Google Mobile Phone for search, email and social nets. Reading about Google’s strategy is interesting. They say they are focused on making search on the handheld more of a “Find” than a “Browse” - this makes a lot of sense as you never want the flood of the Internet into a 2×2 inch screen on a handheld. You also want it personalized and in-context - I also like this since in our world of AI we have been talking about the importance of content-in-context since the 90s! Finally, they like SMS as it is more universal for mobile handhelds but recognize the importance of data services for other countries where people love their iPhones and Blackberries. I also love the idea of Google buying spectrum. As someone who cut her teeth in the world of Telecom Services and now Internet Apps., I know that the carriers who nearly missed the Internet altogether as a way of linking people the world over are insisting that their networks stay closed and this IMHO will strangle their revenues. Organizations like Google whether you love them or hate them, will force the carriers and other giants to shift or die just as Microsoft did to IBM so will Google do to the carriers and Microsoft. Google wants an open mobile platform with people inventing new apps just as they have on the Internet. And Google wants to collect all that potential mobile advertising revenue! Is it really such a bad thing? For the enterprise, you just need to pay attention to things that the enterprise still typically has to worry about like Compliance and Security. Yes, this is probably why Google bought Postini but that will just be the tip of the iceberg for what work they still need to do to get the enterprise on board. For now, their mobile strategy is looking good wrt the consumer market but needs refining wrt the enterprise!

Did you hear the big news today: IBM buys Cognos! So, why is this interesting? IBM has been on a bit of shopping spree in terms of getting a handle on the enterprise content as they did with the FileNet acquisition of last year. Cognos has 25000 customers tracking their business transactions daily! Cognos is roughly a $1 Billion company so IBM got them at 5X as the M&A folks like to say. On one side, this is a great play for IBM and on another it means a bit of interruption for Cognos as customers are always affected by M&As. It is also interesting to see yet another great Canadian company acquired. On the plus side, I saw some nice demos at CTIA 2007 from Cognos linking up to mobile devices like the Berry and Nokia. So they definitely are making nice moves. Let the consolidations continue as long as customers still get access to innovative solutions!

Our iPhone Winner at CTIA 200!!We are still recovering from a great show in San Fran. The interest in partnering in our critical email to SMS capability has not slowed down at all. Platform vendors and SMS aggregators that want more bandwidth charges for the carriers are buzzing us. At CTIA, I heard that there are 30 Billion SMS messages sent around in the US a month now! Finally, the US is catching up with the rest of the world’s SMS traffic! Most of these are from 18 to the 38 year olds with the older school still looking for filtered email push solutions. Kudos to the Ontario Pavilion folks from MEDT and their great ice wine idea. Also, congrats to the honest to goodness winner of the iPhone - I know 180 people that are very jealous of you!

Our iPhone Winner at CTIA 2007!!